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Universities as Centres of Debauchery

Universities are centres of debauchery, and not centres of learning. But for centuries, the general public was illiterate… and anyways, the purpose of universities – then and now – wasn’t (and isn’t) to expand the mind and better master the world around you, but to get a nice, permanent job in the government or the church.

That promise, of gaining exclusive access to nice jobs, is fading. And as it fades, so will the university itself. Especially as getting an online, accredited university education is a good deal cheaper than going to a brick-and-mortar school.

Note: the universities are NOT going to go down because they are centres of debauchery. Parents – definitely NOT excluding Christian parents – simply don’t care, so long as the degree can be used to get a select, high-paying job.

It’s predestined fate will be much like that of the Soviet Union. The USSR was not discredited and abandoned because of its oppression and murder and lies: it was discredited and abandoned because it couldn’t provide a nice standard of living.

It will be the same way for academia: it will not be abandoned because it’s perverted at it’s core, intellectually oppressive, and built on a pack of lies. It won’t even be abandoned because the level of education (outside of engineering, chemistry, and perhaps medicine) is of piss-poor quality. No: it will be abandoned because it can’t guarantee nice, comfortable jobs to officially licensed and certified graduates.

(And yes, those third- and fourth-rate Christian Colleges will be dumped as surely as all the rest of the academic institutions: but the very last will be the spirit-gelding seminaries.)

The debauchery that has taken place since the 1970s is of such a nature that those of us who went to school in the 1950s and even early 1960s can hardly comprehend it. It is not just that they have mixed dormitories. Today, some schools, including some Ivy League schools, now have mixed rooms. That’s right, folks: the boyfriend and girlfriend live in the same dorm room together. This is considered avant-garde. This is not considered an affront to the morality of the parents, who are funding the entire debauched situation. The parents don’t care, and the kids think it’s the best thing that could possibly happen to them.

[Mixed bathrooms were not a reality at the time North wrote this. Prediction: there is going to be a sharp decline of women attending universities in the next decade or so, as horny young men — 100% backed by feminists — understand what kind of gift has been handed to them, and the old prohibitions of men entering the bathrooms of women wither and fade…]

Ancient Traditions

The degree of the campus debauchery is greater today than it has ever been in the past. But it is naïve to think that there is anything fundamentally new about this. Stories of the debauchery of college life go back 800 years. From the very beginnings of the university, male students went into the towns and purchased the services of prostitutes. Male students have always had money in their pockets, even when those pockets were in black gowns. There have always been young women and tavern keepers who have been skilled in separating this money from the pleasure-loving students. To think that what we see today is in principle any different from what parents saw — or chose not to see — in the 12th century is simply naïve. The parents were naïve in the 12th century, and the parents are naïve today.

The university has always been a place of debauchery. It is debauchery in the broadest sense, by which I mean spiritual and intellectual debauchery. From the very first university, which was a specialized law school, the University of Bologna, the state has had a stake in the operation of the curriculum. The state took the graduates of the colleges and put them in charge of the state’s multiplying bureaucracies. The students could read, and they could handle arithmetic, which made them excellent bureaucrats.

[You don’t need a university to learn to read: a good homeschool or free/low-cost online course will do fine.]

Because Christians until the 1960s had never gone to the Bible in search of presuppositions regarding any field of higher education, Christians have been faced from the beginning by a rival system of knowledge to pass on to their children. They have hired tutors who have graduated from universities. There have been different fads of education in the universities over the years, but there has never been any attempt by Christians to reconstruct the first principles of education in terms of biblical revelation. Always, there has been a compromise with the logic of autonomous man.

[Only now, 2000 years later, is the humanism of Our Masters being attacked, root and branch.]

This has not been confined to Christians. Muslims have faced the same problem. Orthodox Jews have faced it. The response of orthodox Muslims has been to avoid higher education. Their schools are tied to the Koran rather than contemporary academic fields.

{It is reasonable to assume the Muslims – who do not believe that men can control their desires, and have a deep hostility to learning – aren’t going to keep up. They simply have no understanding of the need for self-discipline, having the Law engraved in their heart. It’s all about external standards and religious police and conformity to the tribe…]

Orthodox Jews have long been suspicious of the universities. They have seen the threat to their communities of sending their young men into a university environment. One of the best books and movies on this conflict is The Chosen.

The university has always offered education on this basis: anyone who enters the university system of authority must give up the idea of appealing to any source of knowledge outside the confines of the university and its system of hierarchical enforcement. The professors have been willing to teach the sons of families that defend supernatural religions. They have been willing to certify these sons. But the price has always been the same: an admission of subordination to the prevailing academic fads on campus. There is no legitimate appeal to supernatural religion, or to world and life views that do not begin with the assumption of the autonomy of nature, including the mind of man.

[That will remain true for the universities unto the day they die – about a century or so from now, assuming Internet educational trends continue.]

The young women of the medieval world and the Renaissance who functioned as prostitutes to service the young men in the local colleges got paid for their services. Today, because the college campuses seem to the parents as a way to get their daughters married off to men with some kind of economic future — the famous MRS degree — the daughters become competitors with each other to serve the men. Today, the typical college has a 55% to 45% ratio of women to men. This places extreme pressure on the women to provide sexual favors to the men. The men know it, and the men are in a position to demand it.

[Once again, I predict that there will be a sharp decline of women in universities over the next few decades – partly as word of the rapes get around (…and not just in the bathrooms – more bastards will be attending the universities as well…), but also as the expense of a brick-and-mortar university education for all gets simply too high for everyone but the elite.]

Christian Higher Education

We come now to the consideration of the modern Christian college. Officially, in 1790, all of the colleges in the United States were Christian. But, when Harvard College in 1805 hired a Unitarian to teach moral philosophy, it became clear to the Christians of New England that a fundamental change was taking place in higher education. It was in response to that that Jedediah Morse (Samuel F. B.’s father), a Calvinistic Congregationalist, invented the theological seminary. It was Andover seminary. He proposed that young men still attend Harvard College, but, after graduation, they had to go through another three years of advanced theological training, in order to undo the theological and moral education they had received at Harvard. In other words, there was no attempt on the part of Morse and his colleagues to reconstruct the curriculum of Harvard College. There was no attempt to raise the funds to start a new college. The thought of sending them to Yale was unthinkable, because they were all graduates of Harvard. So, they added another three years of higher education, and another three years of tuition expenses, on top of a very expensive program of higher education. This so impressed the Presbyterians that they started their own seminary in Princeton, New Jersey in 1811: known ever since as Princeton Theological Seminary.

The result was the loss of America west of the Alleghenies after 1800 to the Baptists and Methodists. It cost so much to get an education in the mainline denominations that any graduate of the seminary knew he would be paid something like $1,000 a year by a large church. The Baptists were paid nothing, and they were not required to attend college. The Methodists were supposed to be paid about $60 a year, but most of the time they were not paid. So, they became itinerant preachers and circuit riders, each serving half a dozen churches, and allowing elders to rule the local congregations most of the time. The Baptists and Methodists multiplied congregations rapidly, and Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians were confined mostly to the East Coast and the west’s cities. The educational requirements to become a minister were so great East of the Alleghenies that the country went Baptist and Methodist west of the Alleghenies, except in urban areas where Roman Catholics became influential.

Today, upper-middle-class evangelical parents are willing to indebt themselves and basically sacrifice their retirement savings in order to send their children off to church-related colleges and universities. Most of these institutions went secular humanist in the early 20th century. The mainline denominational colleges are as liberal as any state university. But, a comparative handful of evangelical parents fervently pray, their little denominational college has not gone the way of all flesh.

In fact, it went the way of all flesh the day it applied for accreditation by one of the six regional accrediting organizations. These agencies are run, and always have been run, by secular humanists. The parents demand that the colleges be accredited, which means a demand that the colleges crawl on their bellies institutionally, begging for certification by the secular humanists. So, on the one hand, the parents recognize that the children are threatened by the ideology of secular humanism, and threatened to such an extent that the parents are willing to pay fortunes so their children can attend institutions not equally corrupted (they think). But, at the same time, they demand that the institutions corrupt themselves ideologically, even though they supposedly are not going to corrupt themselves sexually and confessionally.

Ha, Ha, Ha.

Also… HA!

The big push to get PhD’s came from John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Rockefeller, following the advice of the extremely liberal Baptist pastor who advised him, Frederick W. Gates, set up the General Education Board in 1902. The Board began to make large grants to private colleges, but with this stipulation: the college would have to hire one or more PhD’s onto the the faculty. They took the money, and the PhD became increasingly entrenched as a required degree for college teaching. After World War II, the requirement became virtually universal for accreditation of four-year institutions.

Step-by-step, the humanists have eliminated Christianity from the curriculum materials in almost every accredited university or college in the United States. This was systematic. They were funded by rich alumni, most of whom were not theologically rigorous, and also by the state. The few self-conscious Christians who understood what was being done nevertheless cooperated with the process.

What Wilson did at Princeton, Charles Eliot had done a generation earlier at Harvard. John D Rockefeller, Sr., did this from the beginning when he created the University of Chicago. First, Wilson quietly politicked to get the Board to persuade Calvinist minister Francis L. Patton to resign in 1902. Patton took over as the figurehead president of Princeton Seminary — no connection — across the street. The Board gave him a huge severance bonus. In short, they bought him off.

That’s why I like Gary North: he tells the truth straight.

Now that we know the past facts, it’s time to decide on our future acts.

We Christians are so quick to lick up the dark smelly sticky sins from the boots of Our Masters… if only we can get a few gold coins thrown in our faces in return.

(Silver coins, nowadays. And not thirty either… one or two is more than sufficient!)

This is true of the universities, and true of the public schools.

No wonder Our Masters are laughing their heads off!

I thinks that it’s time that we stopped our disgraceful behaviour before the enemies of our lawful Lord and God, Jesus Christ.